The AI personal assistant with the “most usage” spanning connectivity across all smart devices, will be the anchor upon which users will gravitate to control their ‘automated’ lives. An Amazon commercial just aired which depicted a dad with his daughter, and the daughter was crying about her boyfriend who happened to be in the front yard yelling for her. The dad says to Amazon’s Alexa, sprinklers on, and yes, the boyfriend got soaked.

What is so special about top spot for the AI Personal Assistant? Controlling the ‘funnel’ upon which all information is accessed, and actions are taken means the intelligent ability to:

Serve up content / information, which could then be mixed in with advertisements, or ‘intelligent suggestions’ based on historical data, i.e. machine learning.

Proactive, suggestive actions may lead to sales of goods and services. e.g. AI Personal Assistant flags potential ‘buys’ from eBay based on user profiles.

Three main sources of AI Personal Assistant value add:

A portal to the “outside” world; E.g. If I need information, I wouldn’t “surf the web” I would ask Cortana to go “Research” XYZ; in the Business Intelligence / data warehousing space, a business analyst may need to run a few queries in order to get the information they wanted. In the same token, Microsoft Cortana may come back to you several times to ask “for your guidance”

An abstraction layer between the user and their apps; The user need not ‘lift a finger’ to any app outside the Personal Assistant with noted exceptions like playing a game for you.

User Profiles derived from the first two points; I.e. data collection on everything from spending habits, or other day to day rituals.

Proactive and chatty assistants may win the “Assistant of Choice” on all platforms. Being proactive means collecting data more often then when it’s just you asking questions ADHOC. Proactive AI Personal Assistants that are Geo Aware may may make “timely appropriate interruptions”(notifications) that may be based on time and location. E.g. “Don’t forget milk” says Siri, as your passing the grocery store. Around the time I leave work Google maps tells me if I have traffic and my ETA.

It’s possible for the [non-native] AI Personal Assistant to become the ‘abstract’ layer on top of ANY mobile OS (iOS, Android), and is the funnel by which all actions / requests are triggered.

Microsoft Corona has an iOS app and widget, which is wrapped around the OS. Tighter integration may be possible but not allowed by the iOS, the iPhone, and the Apple Co. Note: Google’s Allo does not provide an iOS widget at the time of this writing.

Antitrust violation by mobile smartphone maker Apple: iOS must allow for the ‘substitution’ of a competitive AI Personal Assistant to be triggered in the same manner as the native Siri, “press and hold home button” capability that launches the default packaged iOS assistant Siri.

Reminiscent of the Microsoft IE Browser / OS antitrust violations in the past.

Holding the iPhone Home button brings up Siri. There should be an OS setting to swap out which Assistant is to be used with the mobile OS as the default. Today, the iPhone / iPad iOS only supports “Siri” under the Settings menu.

ANY AI Personal assistant should be allowed to replace the default OS Personal assistant from Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana to any startup company with expertise and resources needed to build, and deploy a Personal Assistant solution. Has Apple has taken steps to tightly couple Siri with it’s iOS?

AI Personal Assistant ‘Wish” list:

Interactive, Voice Menu Driven Dialog; The AI Personal Assistant should know what installed [mobile] apps exist, as well as their actionable, hierarchical taxonomy of feature / functions. The Assistant should, for example, ask which application the user wants to use, and if not known by the user, the assistant should verbally / visually list the apps. After the user selects the app, the Assistant should then provide a list of function choices for that application; e.g. “Press 1 for “Play Song”

The interactive voice menu should also provide a level of abstraction when available, e.g. User need not select the app, and just say “Create Reminder”. There may be several applications on the Smartphone that do the same thing, such as Note Taking and Reminders. In the OS Settings, under the soon to be NEW menu ‘ AI Personal Assistant’, a list of installed system applications compatible with this “AI Personal Assistant” service layer should be listed, and should be grouped by sets of categories defined by the Mobile OS.

Capability to interact with IoT using user defined workflows. Hardware and software may exist in the Cloud.

Ever tighter integration with native as well as 3rd party apps, e.g. Google Allo and Google Keep.

Apple could already be making the changes as a natural course of their product evolution. Even if the ‘big boys’ don’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest, all you need is VC and a few good programmers to pick a fight with Apple.

It looks like Microsoft created a generic workflow platform, product independent.

Microsoft has software solutions, like MS Outlook with an [email] rules engine built into Outlook. SharePoint has a workflow solution within the Sharepoint Platform, typically governing the content flowing through it’s system.

Microsoft Flow is a different animal. It seems like Microsoft has built a ‘generic’ rules engine for processing almost any event. The Flow product:

Start using the product from one of two areas: a) “My Flows” where I may view existing and create new [work]flows. b) “Activity”, that shows “Notifications” and “Failures”

Select “My Flows”, and the user may “Create [a workflow] from Blank”, or “Browse Templates”. MSFT existing set of templates were created by Microsoft, and also by a 3rd party implying a marketplace.

Select “Create from Blank” and the user has a single drop down list of events, a culmination events across Internet products. There is an implication there could be any product, and event “made compatible” with MSFT Flows.

The drop down list of events has a format of “Product – Event”. As the list of products and events grow, we should see at least two separate drop down lists, one for products, and a sub list for the product specific events.

Several Example Events Include:

“Dropbox – When a file is created”

“Facebook – When there is a new post to my timeline”

“Project Online – When a new task is created”

“RSS – When a feed item is published”

“Salesforce – When an object is created”

The list of products as well as there events may need a business analyst to rationalize the use cases.

Once an Event is selected, event specific details may be required, e.g. Twitter account details, or OneDrive “watch” folder

Next, a Condition may be added to this [work]flow, and may be specific to the Event type, e.g. OneDrive File Type properties [contains] XYZ value. There is also an “advanced mode” using a conditional scripting language.

There is “IF YES” and “IF NO” logic, which then allows the user to select one [or more] actions to perform

Several Action Examples Include:

“Excel – Insert Rows”

“FTP – Create File”

“Google Drive – List files in folder”

“Mail – Send email”

“Push Notification – Send a push notification”

Again, it seems like an eclectic bunch of Products, Actions, and Events strung together to have a system to POC.

The Templates list, predefined set of workflows that may be of interest to anyone who does not want to start from scratch. The UI provides several ways to filter, list, and search through templates.

Applicable to everyday life, from an individual home user, small business, to the enterprise. At this stage the product seems in Beta at best, or more accurately, just after clickable prototype. I ran into several errors trying to go through basic use cases, i.e. adding rules.

Despite the “Preview” launch, Microsoft has showed us the power in [work]flow processing regardless of the service platform provider, e.g. Box, DropBox, Facebook, GitHub, Instagram, Salesforce, Twitter, Google, MailChimp, …

Microsoft may be the glue to combine service providers who may / expose their services to MSFT Flow functionality.

IBM Watson Cognitive API, Text to Speech, occurs, and the product of the action is placed in the same Box folder.

Action: Using Microsoft Edge (powered by MSN), in the “My news feed” tab, enable action to publish “Cards”, such as app notifications

Challenges \ Opportunities \ Unknowns

3rd party companies existing, published [cloud; web service] APIs may not even need any modification to integrate with Microsoft Flow; however, business approval may be required to use the API in this manner,

It is unclear re: Flow Templates need to be created by the product owner, e.g. Telestream, or knowledgeable third party, following the Android, iOS, and/or MSFT Mobile Apps model.

It is unclear if the MSFT Flow app may be licensed individually in the cloud, within the 365 cloud suite, or offered for Home and\or Business?

“…companies like Google and Facebook pay top dollar for some really smart people. Only a few hundred souls on Earth have the talent and the training needed to really push the state-of-the-art [AI] forward, and paying for these top minds is a lot like paying for an NFL quarterback. That’s a bottleneck in the continued progress of artificial intelligence. And it’s not the only one. Even the top researchers can’t build these services without trial and error on an enormous scale. To build a deep neural network that cracks the next big AI problem, researchers must first try countless options that don’t work, running each one across dozens and potentially hundreds of machines.”

This article represents a true picture of where we are today for the average consumer and producer of information, and the companies that repurpose information, e.g. in the form of advertisements.

The advancement and current progress of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, analogously paints a picture akin to the 1970s with computers that fill rooms, and accept punch cards as input.

Today’s consumers have mobile computing power that is on par to the whole rooms of the 1970s; however, “more compute power” in a tinier package may not be the path to AI sentience. How AI algorithm models are computed might need to take an alternate approach.

In a classical computation system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other. However quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a superposition of both states at the same time, a property which is fundamental to quantum computing.

The construction, and validation of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, algorithm models should be engineered on a Quantum Computing framework.

Artificial Intelligent (AI) “Assistants”, or “Bots” are taken to the ‘next level’ when the assistant becomes a proactive entitybased on the input from human intelligent experts that grows with machine learning.

Even the implication of an ‘Assistant’ v. ‘Life Partner’ implies a greater degree of dynamic, and proactive interaction. The cross over to becoming ‘Life Partner’ is when we go ‘above and beyond’ to help our partners succeed, or even survive the day to day.

Once we experience our current [digital, mobile] ‘assistants’ positively influencing our lives in a more intelligent, proactive manner, an emotional bond ‘grows’, and the investment in this technology will also expand.

Practical Applications Range:

Alcoholics Anonymous Coach , Mentor – enabling the human partner to overcome temporary weakness. Knowledge, and “triggers” need to be incorporated into the AI ‘Partner’; “Location / Proximity” reminder if person enters a shopping area that has a liquor store. [AI] “Partner” help “talk down”

Understanding ‘data points’ from multiple sources, such as alarms, and calendar events, to derive ‘knowledge’, and create an actionable trigger.

e.g. “Did you remember to take your medicine?” unprompted; “There is a new article in N periodical, that pertains to your medicine. Would you like to read it?”

e.g. 2 unprompted, “Weather calls for N inches of Snow. Did you remember to service your Snow Blower this season?”

FinTech – while in department store XYZ looking to purchase Y over a certain amount, unprompted “Your credit score indicates you are ‘most likely’ eligible to ‘sign up’ for a store credit card, and get N percentage off your first purchase” Multiple input sources used to achieve a potential sales opportunity.

IBM has a cognitive cloud of AI solutions leveraging IBM’s Watson. Most/All of the 18 web applications they have hosted (with source) are driven by human interactive triggers, as with the “Natural Language Classifier”, which helps build a question-and-answer repository.

There are four bits that need to occur to accelerate adoption of the ‘AI Life Partner’:

Knowledge Experts, or Subject Matter Experts (SME) need to be able to “pass on” their knowledge to build repositories. IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier may be used.

The integration of this knowledge into an AI medium, such as a ‘Digital Assistant’ needs to occur with corresponding ‘triggers’

Our current AI ‘Assistants’ need to become [more] proactive as they integrate into our ‘digital’ lives, such as going beyond the setting of an alarm clock, hands free calling, or checking the sports score. Our [AI] “Life Partner” needs to ‘act’ like buddy and fan of ‘our’ sports team. Without prompting, proactively serve up knowledge [based on correlated, multiple sources], and/or take [acceptable] actions.

E.g. FinTech – “Ourschedule is open tonight, and there are great seats available, Section N, Seat A for ABC dollars on Stubhub. Shall I make the purchase?”

Partner with vendors to drive FinTech business rules.

Take ‘advantage’ of more knowledge sources, such as the applications we use that collect our data. Use multiple knowledge sources in concert, enabling the AI to correlate data and propose ‘complex’ rules of interaction.

Our AI ‘Life Partners’ may grow in knowledge, and mature the relationship between man and machine. Incorporating derived rules leveraging machine learning, without input of a human expert, will come with risk and reward.

Pure Storage is looking to “compress” the amount of data that can be stored in a Storage Array using Flash Memory, “Flashblade”. They are also tuning the capabilities of the solution for higher I/O throughput, and optimized, addressable storage.

Several companies with large and growing storage footprints have already begin to customize their storage solutions to accommodate the void in this space.

Building more storage arrays is a temporary measure while the masses of people, or fleets of cars turn on their IoT enabled devices.

Data is flooding the Internet, and innumerable, duplicate ‘objects’ of information, requiring redundant storage, are prevalent conditions. A registry, or public ‘records’ may be maintained. Based on security measures, and the public’s appetite determine what “information objects” may be centrally located. As intermediaries, registrars may build open source repositories, as an example, using Google Drive, or Microsoft Azure based on the data types of ‘Information Objects”

Information object registrars may contain all different types of objects, which indicate where data resides on the Internet.

another example, Domain Name System (DNS) is the best example of the registration process I am suggesting to clone and leverage for all types of data ranging from entertainment to medical records.

Medical “Records”, or Medical “Information Objects”

X-ray images, everything from dental to medical, and correlating to other medical information object(s),

Official ‘Education’ records from K-12 and beyond, e.g. degrees and certifications achieved;

Secure, easy access to ‘public’ ‘information objects’ by the owner, and creator. Central portal(s) driving user traffic. Enables ‘owner’ of records to take ‘ownership’ of their health, for example

Note: there are already ‘open’ platforms being developed and used for several industries including medical; with limed access. However, the changes I’m proposing imposes a ‘registrar’ process whereby portals of information are registered, and are interwoven, linking to one another.

It’s an issue of excess weight upon the “Internet”, and not just the ‘weight’ of unnecessary storage, the throughput within a weaved set of networks as well.

Think of it in terms of opportunity cost. First quantify what an ‘information object’, or ‘block of data’ equates to in cost. It seems there must already be a measurement in existence, a medium amount to charge / cost per “information object”. Finally, for each information object type, e.g. song, movie, news story, technical specifications, etc. identify how many times this exact object is perpetuated in the Internet.

Each of the attributes describing information objects are built out as these assets are being used; e.g. proactive autopopulate search, and using an AI Induction engine

X out of Y metadata type and values are equivalent

the more attributes correlate to one or more objects, the more likely these objects are

related on some level, e.g. sibling, cousin

or identical objects, and may need meta relationship update

the metadata encapsulates the ‘information object’

Another opportunity to organize “Information Asset Objects” would be to leverage the existing DNS platform for managing “Information Asset Repositories”. This additional Internet DNS structure would enable queries across information asset repositories. Please see “So Much Streaming Music, Just Not in One Place” for more details.

Anyone who is anti “Big Brother”, this may not be the article for you, in fact skip it. 🙂

In the not so distant future, “Data Sifter” companies consisting of Subject Matter Experts (SME) across all verticals, may process your data feeds collected from ‘smart objects’. Consumers will be encouraged to submit their Smart data to ‘data sifters’ who will offer incentives such as a reduction of insurance premiums.

Everything from activity trackers, home automation, to vehicular automation data may be captured and aggregated. The data collected can then be sliced and diced to provide macro and micro views of the information. On the abstract, or macro level the information may allow for demographic, statistical correlations, which may contribute to corporate strategy.

On a granular view, the data will provide “data sifters” the opportunity to sift through ‘smart’ object data to perform analysis, and correlations that lead to actionable information.

Is it secure? Do you care if a hacker steals your weight loss information? In fact, you might feel more nervous if only the intended parties are allowed to collect the information. Collected ‘Smart Object’ data enables SMEs to correlate the datainto:

Canned, ‘intelligent’ reports targeted to specific subject matter, or across silos of data

‘Universes’ (i.e. Business Objects) of data that may be ‘mined’ by consumer approved, ‘trusted’ third party companies, e.g. your insurance companies.

Actionable information based on AI subject matter rules engines

Consumers, people, may have the option of sharing their personal data with specific companies by proxy, through a ‘data bank’ down to the data point collected The sharing of personal data or information:

Targeted, affordable, medicine that may redirect the choice of the doctor to an alternate. The MD would be contacted to validate the alternate.

The ‘smart object’ data collected may be harnessed by thousands of affinity groups to provide very discrete products and services. The power of this collected ‘smart data’ and correlated information stretches beyond any consumer relationship experienced today.

At some point, health insurance companies may require you to wear a tracker to increase or slash premiums. Auto Insurance companies may offer discounts for access to car smart data to make sure suggested maintenance guidelines for service are met.

You may approve your “data bank” to give access to specific soliciting government agencies or private research firms looking to analyze data for their studies. You may qualify based on the demographic, abstracted data points collected. Incentives provided may be tax credits, or paying studies.

‘Smart Object’ Adoption and Affordability

[US] tax coupons to enable the buyer, at the time of purchase, to save money. For example, a 100 USD discount applied at the time of purchase of an Activity Tracker, with the stipulation that you may agree, at some point, to participate in a study.

Government subsidies: the cost of ‘Smart Objects’ through annual tax deductions. Today, tax incentives may allow you to purchase a ‘Smart Object’ if the cost is an itemized medical tax deduction, such as an Activity Tracker that monitors your heart rate, if your medical condition requires it.

Google Plus mobile should have the stylistic capabilities of Instagram to apply to their mobile photos, on Android, for example. At this point, you cannot apply the styles to photos as you can on Facebook / Instagram, and post photos to Google Plus.

So, the obvious thing here is Facebook wants to kill Off Instagram. You think core users, won’t care, possibly? Is it even legal, their new terms of service, questionable, with adding the bit regarding minors being included. So why buy Instagram, and put outrageous terms to the very popular service. One reason might be a common tale, where a suitor company will buy what it projects has high market share they are already, or plan on getting into, to allow them to grab mass market share. The suitor company may already be in the market, and simply can capitalize on their resources, e.g. staff, technology, and then try to run the ship aground, i.e. sabotage. demoting the acquired company by putting a poor taste in the customers path, and the original suitor company offers an alternate path, which attracts the customer base to convert. Some of the articles in the New York Times, What Instagram’s New Terms of Service Mean for You and an a Mashable OP-ED piece, Instagram Will Basically Sign Your Life Away imply picking up your pitchforks and rally us around Instagram, and apply a crowd mentality to trample yourself away from Instagram.

If this is the Facebook / Instagram business model, as these folk are interpreting the requirements, I am not so personally keen on my daughter using Instagram, and her showing up in an advertisement, as I think I read this bit from the interpreted TOS. I don’t think the kid would be too keen either, probably for a different reason then her Father. Advertisements can be taken out of context, or you may loose control of how your face is integrated with a product or service, and might not necessarily agree with its use. Talk about your type-casting. A teen shows up in an advertisement for acne, she doesn’t know about the advertisement until it’s posed on her locker, and this is a relatively innocent example.. In addition, a capitalistic kid would say, “I am not particularly keen on my face, or pictures showing up somewhere without my permission, but hey, where is my cut.”

There are already established platforms that sell photographer’s photos through established licencing models, and sure, that may be another more viable model for the Facebook / Instagram folks, but hey, I am just a man with a keyboard, and half a brain.

Last night I was driving my daughter and her guy friend home from an after school program, and I really like this kid, he’s a little tech geek like me. I spoke to this computer savvy twelve year old kid, and was asking him all these questions from a kid’s perspective about all these new technologies. He was articulating and rattling off thought provoking and meaningful information. It was like I was talking to an industry analyst, bright fun, good kid. He and I talked non-stop, and after we dropped him off, and I realized we monopolized the conversation, and my daughter might have wanted to get in a word, so I apologized. Forgot what it was like to be teen, a girl no less.

Anyway, in the mist of our discussion the kid said he uses a gmail account instead of his default ISP. I asked him about what he thought of Google Plus. He said he did some exploring of it. “Yeah, Google + was created to compete with Facebook, but it’s not really that great.” I asked him if he knew about a few features I thought were cool, and his response was “No, not really, Instagram,” he said “was ‘killin it’ though.” We went onto more market analysis of the space. I was amazed. Kids.

It was then I realized why the kid didn’t get past the first page. Appeal and usability. These are concepts in User Interface design and are essential in attracting users. These types of features are usually added later on. The standard technology mantra, is “Make it work, then make it work [faster, refine UI, etc]. If I was trying to really be unbiased, Google Plus is tantamount to a Beta product. As an example, the “Your Circle” buttons truncate the Circle name, are square shaped, and don’t have an appeal. In fact, many of the user interface features feel canned. The user interface is not the focus initially when putting out a product, especially when you are in a rapid mode of delivering, and are certain your product may change drastically, i.e. based on your road map, user feedback, and so on. Although I really like the baseline platform, and am trying not to be, I am a bit biased in favor of Google. Google Plus looks like they are using the Agile methodology with Scrum Sprints and constant releases. To be clear, I am using their own, Google’s latest browser Chrome, on Windows 7 with a powerful computer.

So, what does this teach us? Well, in Project Management, sometimes you can add all the resources in the world to a project, but at some point you get diminishing returns, and there is a limit to delivery capability even using Agile and Scrum methodologies, especially if Social Networking is high on Google’s agenda. Agile requires user feedback, hence the release, and user response cyclical feedback loop.

If Facebook uses facial recognition, why not expand to cover vendor / partner library catalogs, use the AI Image Recognition to identify objects, and ‘read’ and recognize simple phrases from the captions or comments of pictures. If the caption says ‘nice dress’, you can use the AI image recognition rules engine to suggest N list of vendors, local and web, with the lowest price, and ‘Buy Now’ if you ‘Like’ the picture.